Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (23 page)

The project was infected with feature creep. The games could be huge, perhaps even use a second processor – they could do things no other game could. Parallel projects for the two big
platforms were put into motion: artist Roger Dean, famed for his prog-rock album covers, was hired to produce artwork for
Psyclapse
and
Bandersnatch
and, never shy, Imagine booked
advertising space with teasers leading all the way from February to the games’ launch in July.

When Anderson and his crew arrived, developers John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn were working hard on
Bandersnatch
, but there was no
Psyclapse
code, only ideas on paper. There
were no screenshots and no plot, in fact no details at all that the adverts could dangle in front of customers. The only ‘facts’ the company could tout were that the games were
happening, and they were big.

So that’s what Everiss sold. The campaign is notorious now – all
the more so because at the time it worked well. It showed four programmers gazing into the
golden glow of an unseen image of a television, and a bit of blurb telling potential buyers that they were working on something awesome. And, optimistically, that it was coming soon.

Over the following months, there was still nothing to show, and in the adverts – already paid for – the idea started to look stretched. A ‘progress report’ told readers
that the programming team had drunk a thousand cups of coffee. A third advert, ‘Reinforcements arrive’, gave some Imagine musicians and artists their moment of fame. But after three
months of hype, not a pixel of the games had been seen, and they would have to be truly incredible to warrant this build-up.

In fact, they weren’t really anything. Progress had been slow, particularly for
Psyclapse
. And the hardware that was essential to the design and marketing of the game was still
ethereal, and starting to look expensive. The team was committed to a project with unknown, but escalating costs – it was beginning to look as if the unit price might reach forty pounds,
while games typically sold for five or ten. To pad out the value and justify a bigger box, Everiss suggested including a T-shirt. Anderson’s documentary shows an Imagine saleswoman stoically
trying to persuade a dubious distributor to order a game he has never seen at an astronomical price. What had started as a trick to beat pirates had ended up staking the future of the company on a
bet with some very long odds.

But Imagine was already sunk. Its wage bill, overheads and debts were huge, and its cashflow had all but stopped. The bestseller for 1982 had been written in two days; in 1984, two games had
tied up the company for months, and between those times Imagine had been ruinously mismanaged. In his documentary, Anderson shows a man from the duplicating company pacing up and down in the
company’s lobby, still hoping for £50,000 that he’s owed for a Christmas booking.

One lunchtime in April, Anderson and his crew went to the pub
with the Imagine staff. When they returned, administrators had locked the building. Everiss said in the
months afterwards that the company had not filed a single VAT return, or performed any kind of financial accounting worth the name. Anderson had been wise enough to see that Imagine was shaky, and
had lined up David Ward at Ocean’s Manchester office to flesh out the narrative. The documentary and Imagine’s story both end there, with Ocean’s
Hunchback II
cleaning up
at Christmas, and Ward purchasing the Imagine brand name and taking on some of its staff.
Bandersnatch
, the only mega-game to have made any headway, was optioned by Sinclair for the QL.
The contract said royalties must go to the administrator.

That’s not where
Bandersnatch
ended up, though. Lawson and finance director Ian Hetherington put together a rescue package to take the title and some staff into a company called
Finchspeed. If the QL version was finished, it never appeared, but when Finchspeed was wound down, the pair established Psygnosis, a publisher dedicated to the next generation of home computers.
Psygnosis published the remains of
Bandersnatch
as a game called
Brataccas
. Its reviews were terrible.

Imagine failed because it ran uncontrolled costs, was absurdly ambitious and overstocked some weak games. It was one of many companies that didn’t survive the 8-bit
period, but there were also plenty that did make it through in one form or another – the quality of the company and its games really did matter.

In the decades since the debacle, Everiss has hardened his view that it was piracy that destroyed his business. He is no defender of the management: had piracy been Imagine’s
only
problem, the company could have kept going. But without the sudden industry-wide drop in revenue, it might have ridden through all the mistakes the cash had hidden. Neither alternative history is
bulletproof though – it seems all too credible that revenues tanked in January 1984 because gamers didn’t want to buy
Pedro.
But Everiss does tell an interesting story to
support his view.

‘We got a lorry load – several tonnes – of cassettes back from WH Smith,’ he says, ‘which they had taken back from their customers as
being faulty. Which weren’t faulty. They had just taken them home, copied them and returned them. And so WH Smith said they weren’t going to pay us for many thousands of cassettes which
they had bought off us.’ He doesn’t think that WH Smith were any the wiser; they genuinely believed they were returning a duff batch of tapes. But this marked a permanent shift in
Imagine’s fortunes. ‘We had built up to a million-pounds-a-month turnover company,’ he says. ‘And suddenly the carpet was pulled from under us. Piracy killed off the home
computers. Definitely.’

Home computers didn’t die, but they did stop being British. The UK’s manufacturers had a long innings: the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum, now manufactured by
Amstrad, remained on sale into the late eighties, in some form or other, and were only officially discontinued years after that. However, Amstrad itself never seemed wholly committed to the
gamer-hobbyist market – the company appeared to regard it as just another one of its electronics lines, like its word processors and PC compatibles. Amstrad arrived late and left, it seemed,
with a shrug.

Acorn and Sinclair had built their fortunes, with some establishment help, by ploughing virgin soil. Each had a parochial success with a computer that reflected its makers’ passions, as
well as the mass markets they sought, and then each floundered when it stretched too far. But perhaps those choices barely mattered. Outside the closed British market, behemoths of computing were
already dominant: IBM, Microsoft, and dozens of makes of computer that were compatible with them. The companies making home machines were smaller, but still giants – by the late eighties,
Atari and Commodore were poised with computers that were already successes in the US. Even with the best possible luck, a small British company would have had a fight on its hands.

But the Sinclair and Acorn machines had nurtured the skills and
the desire to make games in the UK. Between them, but perhaps more due to the BBC Micro, they had made
programming a common skill. And the two computers, especially the ZX Spectrum, had created a demand for games that were only ever likely to be made in Britain.

It was a walled garden, perfect for developing a nation’s talent, but also trapping it. It may have been a blow that the British computers gave way to international ones, but it was vital.
Now home-grown developers could find an audience anywhere. Now British games could go global.

There was, though, one final home computing platform to emerge from Britain; a last hurrah from Acorn, its development kept a secret from the company’s Italian
owners.

In 1983, Hermann Hauser had become convinced that his team needed to learn how to design silicon chips. ‘So he bought some workstations and engineers,’ says Furber, ‘and
wondered what to do with them.’ Furber and Sophie Wilson had gripes about the chips available to them – that they didn’t work well with the memory they used, and required slow,
complex instructions – so they agreed to visit a chip-design plant in Arizona, to see how Acorn could make its own. They had been expecting shining buildings flush with powerful technology.
They found a small bungalow using Apple IIs and local students. It was a revelation: ‘If they can design a processor then so can we,’ Furber recalls thinking.

Hauser has a theory about why the design of Acorn’s first, and incredibly successful, chip worked so well: they had no people, and no money. ‘There’s more than a grain of truth
here,’ admits Furber.

He and Wilson reasoned that if they kept the chip as simple as possible, less could go wrong – they built a virtual version in just 803 lines of BBC Basic. It used a simplified design
philosophy called the Reduced Instruction Set Chip, which had been proposed by a computer engineer working in Berkeley, California. But Furber and Wilson’s was the first developed for use in
a home computer. They
called it the ARM: Acorn RISC Machine. And they tested their prototype using the ‘tube’ for second processors that Wilson had designed
into the BBC Micro.

The chip was phenomenally fast, and used very little power. They designed a computer called the Archimedes to house it, and the new machine proved faster than any other home or business PC. Sat
next to the top-end gaming computers from the US at the time, the Amiga and the Atari ST, the Archimedes visibly and crushingly outperformed them even though it lacked their specialist graphics
hardware.

But Chris Curry says that Acorn never had those computers in its sights: ‘The Archimedes was just there to be the racehorse, the thoroughbred, the one that was faster and better than
everything else.’

David Braben was given a prototype of the ARM prior to the release of the Archimedes, and fell into developing again. ‘It was a great machine for writing games on –
I couldn’t resist!’ In three months he wrote a game called
Lander
that was supplied on the machine’s welcome disc. It was small, more of a demonstration than a full
release, but it still wowed gamers when they first saw it. At a time when landscapes were shown as flat horizons,
Lander
had an undulating terrain of tiny patchwork tiles. The potential
for gaming was obvious.

But the computer was expensive, costing twice as much as its rivals, and so Acorn’s target market was, once again, educational. Few publishers bothered to produce games for it, and the
ones who did were Acorn specialists: Superior Software, which published a game of Braben’s landscape demo called
Zarch
, and its arch rival in a tiny pond, 4
^th
Dimension.
Overwhelmingly, their programmers were individuals or pairs working from home. The games business for the last British home computer couldn’t shake off its roots.

At seventeen, years after his ZX Spectrum had died, Andrew Hutchings saw an Archimedes playing a demo of
Zarch
in a shop window, and he bought one. He was hoping to learn to program it,
to write the kind of games he had only started on his Sinclair machine. It turned out to be painless. ‘The ease of learning BASIC
and assembly language on the
Archimedes was a major factor in my success,’ he says. ‘I might never have achieved the same on the other computers.’

He discovered the same compulsion that had gripped countless other home programmers over the past decade. He wasn’t an academic – at the time he was employed in a factory office
– but he worked hungrily through the puzzles of assembly language and 3D graphics in his evenings. Eventually, he had put together a split-screen, two-player biplane flight simulator, which
he sent to Steve Botteril at 4
^th
Dimension. ‘They offered me a £1,000 advance and a royalty to develop the game,’ he recalls. ‘Without any hesitation I left my
office job.’

Chocks Away
earned him three pounds per copy. It added up to a few thousand pounds, and was enough to let him develop full time. An old school friend, Tim Parry, also had an Archimedes,
and together they programmed their next game,
Stunt Racer 2000
. Like
Chocks Away
, it was a big hit in the small world of Acorn gaming, but they were disappointed with their
earnings. The income was incentive enough to encourage them to publish for themselves, though, and Fednet was formed.

The game they developed for their fledgling company,
Star Fighter 3000
, was astonishing. It was a 3D arcade fighter with huge playgrounds of destructible scenery, filled with dogfights,
space battles, exploding buildings, and looming motherships. Special effects that rival computers simply couldn’t manage were thrown around with abandon as laser fire blasted enemies and
scorched the earth. There was no doubt it would sell.

The pair decided to build up to a grand release at the 1994 Acorn World show. In the final weeks they were turning in twenty-hour days and taking turns to grab small amounts of sleep. They
finished the game the night before their deadline, and stayed up copying as many discs as they could manage in readiness for the launch.

Star Fighter 3000
was a fantastic debut for Fednet, but also the last great game for the Archimedes. The computer was a technological
showcase, but in the
gaming world it was a relic of a lost age. Some Archimedes owners bought games, but gamers didn’t buy the Archimedes. By the time
Star Fighter 3000
was launched, the
‘golden’ era of British home games writing had long passed. It had given birth to hundreds of publishers of all sizes, and thousands of developers. The industry’s character was
shaped by that time: writing computer games was an individual’s art, a personal, quirky endeavour where a trivial business model offered any idea, however strange, a potential audience. Even
as bedroom coding faded, it left behind its culture, in the careers and companies that it had nurtured, all formed over the course of barely half a decade.